The Punchline
by Vashagud
Summary: When you're caught in the joke that just keeps on giving, you roll with the punches. Because there will be many. Cloti.


The night he came home to find a boy with wide, suspicious blue eyes that followed him behind the bar and up the stairs, he was sorely tempted to ask Tifa if there was something she hadn't told him. But his rare attempted jokes were always either greeted with a thunderous silence which reminded him why he usually kept his mouth shut, or that he was still not completely informed on things not to say to his best friend, off and on again girlfriend, frequent bedmate, and former team mate. Sometimes, he even considered buying a ring and getting it over with. What was another title, she was already like a wife, and they officially had children, since she collected them like some people collected bottle caps.

She never laughed at any of his jokes, though she'd told him once that it was hard to tell whether he was joking or not, since he was always so stonefaced, and didn't even laugh at his _own_ jokes.

How was she to know then? Especially since his jokes were actually kind of depressing, and when they weren't they were just some dark abstraction mingled with that refreshing, but sometimes hurtful honesty.

Cloud was just grateful he had managed to get himself into a place where he didn't feel like running out and starting up his bike the moment the door shut behind him. He had, in truth, done it all for her. Not so much for himself. And he'd hoped it was enough. He'd give his life in a second for her, but that was really all he had to give her. He supposed, he also contributed with the income that came from his delivery service.

Sometimes he'd wake to the sound of her quiet crying in the one pillow he kept on his bed. And he'd take her into his arms, which lay still and slack around her shaking form. He is sorry for everything he isn't, everything she needs him to be. And he thinks it's ridiculous that still she refuses to leave him. He thinks about the deliveries he will need to make the next day, and he thinks briefly about letting Aerith's body out into the water, and that it feels the same as this. But he doesn't tell her that, because he is certain that is one of those things he would be better keeping to himself.

And then one day, since he knows he'll probably be around for a while, to watch a few of those kids grow up, he gets a ring. It is a dainty silver band and on the way home, he pictures her in a white dress, standing in the middle of a procession of children, hair piled high the way she pulls it up when she asks him to zip her up. Or zip her down. She will be beautiful. Happy. Not crying.

He closes the door quietly behind him, and it's ten pm. She is cleaning up for the night. She asks him how work was like she always does and he replies that same way he always does. Fine.

He tries to get her to be still for one second, but she's moving around in that frantic and diligent way she has about her lately, so he grabs her wrists and she stops, looks at him.

"I think we should get married." he says, and she is really quiet. Then he watches her bottom lip quiver like it does before she tells him that he is insensitive or _please don't leave, I need you, we'll work through this please... _But she doesn't do either of those things.

She laughs. She laughs, and it sounds strangely like the way glasses do when they shatter on the floor. She pulls her wrists back and gets back to what she was doing.

"Okay, I'll admit, that was funny." she says and he puts his hands back by his sides. She is still laughing quietly to herself. He nods, smiles.

"I guess it is." and he laughs too.

And when he is alone again, he tosses the ring in the garbage and laughs. And later on when she has yet again finished crying, and has fallen asleep in the limp circle of his arms, he takes one hand and piles her hair high up on her head. He gazes through the darkness at her white face and shoulders, lets her hair back down, and laughs again, a grainy broken sound that follows him to the water, where he'd held one corpse, and to the now, where he holds another.

These are the kinds of jokes he knows, and the planet has always got a punchline ready.

He enters stage left, to that familiar place, where pieces of past characters lay full of dust behind the curtain. He is a husk, grasping at a microphone and whatever is left of his original self.

His act is full of boys who gaze at stolen recruitment posters late at night, thinking hard on armor and silver hair, and who take the most sensible road towards it, which inadvertently leads to all his posters burning in a fire that also kills his mother.

His act is full of heroes who have died at the hands of the very things that made them who they were. A first class soldier, to the steel monopoly that gave him the title, the power, but not the heart, a flowergirl under the weight of a planet that could whisper, that could _scream_, until she was at her knees, willing to sacrifice everything, and a silver general, to the lies and monstrous roots that sent him spiraling downward in a blaze, faster than even his meteoric rise to fame.

His act is full of a love for the mayor's daughter, a darkhaired and unattainable catalyst that sent him on his way, to be better. And now he has her in his arms, and he feels nothing.

What's more, it may very well be a consequence of the same journey that was supposed to bring them together. A quest to become something great, has ended with him becoming nothing at all. Though the newspapers claim he is a hero. And he supposes, that is a part of the joke too.

He has stripped away so many parts of himself in the past few years. Whether he was trying to be strong, hanging onto ideals and memories or tearing away the facades, the faces and aspirations that are no longer his, just to return to normal. And the closest he has gotten to normal, is this kind of vacancy, that really only bothers him because of what it's doing to Tifa.

He thinks again of the ring in the garbage. And creeping out of bed, he walks silently to it and fishes the ring out. His life has been a mosaic of ruses, so what is one more, he thinks. He cleans it off in the bathroom sink, and holds it wet and shining in his hand.

When he climbs back into bed, he thinks for a while, watching as she curls around that pillow which is certainly more apt at cuddling than he ever has been. He reaches out in the dark, shakes her shoulder. She shoots up, having spent too much time having to be alert around the clock.

"What's wrong?" Everything, he thinks. But what good does it do to talk about things that can't be fixed?

"Nothing." Tifa runs a hand through her hair.

"Cloud?" He watches her struggle to see him, and he regrets not turning on the lights. Though technically, this whole thing will be easier to do in the dark.

"We should get married." He hears her breath catch, but then she's shaking her head.

"Have you been sleeping Cloud?" No, not really.

"Yeah."

"It's late Cloud."

"You need to wear a white dress."

"What?" she gives him a strange look. "Go back to bed." she goes to settle down again, but he grabs her close by her middle. The contact is familiar. They have never had any trouble with the physical things. His hand slides up the back of her neck and into her hair, lifting some of it up into a messy bun."And you'll wear your hair like this."

"Really? But that doesn't look good at all."

"Tifa."

"Yes?"

Will you marry me?" Tifa swallows.

"Stop it." He blinks.

"I..."

"Just stop it, okay?" He is confused by her reaction. He brings the ring up, and holds the silver band up for her to see, but it is so dark he instead holds it against the hot skin of her neck.

"Do you feel that? It's real." he breathes deep as the moment catches up with him. "You can bite it if you want."

"Don't joke right now."

"I wasn't joking before." he says, wondering why she was making this so hard. Isn't this what she wanted?

"Say you love me." she says, suddenly sounding close to tears and it dawns on him that somehow he has really messed this up. And she is crying now, and for the first time it makes him angry instead of sorry. She clenches down on his arms with her fingers, and he looks into her eyes, they are desperate and wild. "..say it to me."

He wasn't expecting her to ask for that, though now he wonders how he even thought she wouldn't. And as good as he is at forming and maintaining ruses, this one was remarkably hard to start. He hesitates, and he almost can't say it. He hates lying to her. But right now the ends really do justify the means. He doesn't want to see her cry anymore.

"I love you." he says, gaze never wavering. It is completely silent for the few seconds before she slaps him right across the face with stunning accuracy considering the fact that she isn't the one of the two of them with genetically enhanced vision. She storms away from the bed, and he is so shocked at what has just happened, he doesn't get up to run after her until she has made it out of the door.

He makes sure to be quiet in his pursuit, because the children are in the house, and he's not sure himself what he has set off. He is faster than her, and he catches up with her in the hallway, the side of his face still stinging.

"Tifa?" She stops, wipes at her face and turns around. "Tifa, I'm sorry for...whatever I did." He has long accepted that most of the time, he'll have no idea what he'd done wrong. But the best damage control was an apology, even if he didn't know quite what he was apologizing for.

"You know exactly what you did."

"I..." Then, she is walking towards him like this time she might forgo the slaps for punches.

"Why would you do that?"

"Ask you to marry me?" He asked incredulously, completely disbelieving that this had turned into such a disaster. He had only done it because he was sure she wanted it. He thought she'd just say yes, and maybe she'd stop crying so much if he committed and told her what she had wanted to hear for so long, but that he could not truthfully say.

"Why?" she asked and he sighed.

"Because I..."

"If you tell me you love me one more time, Cloud Strife-"

"Isn't this what you wanted?" The look in her eye softened.

"No, I don't want anymore lies." He was silent. "I know you well enough to tell, you know."

"So your answer is no."

"...Yes. Either it's real or it's nothing, I can't...handle any more charades."

"Really?" He asks, and she sees the truth high and bright in his eyes. But over time he has learned to keep it to himself, and she knows it is completely for her benefit. He can say some really strange, unsettling things, but at the root of it all is that honesty. And she's constantly telling him to smile a little, as if that has anything to with it. She's constantly telling him to stop being so gloomy, as if that is the simple sum of it all. It's an easy dismissal of something she doesn't want to see yet, something that hurts, whether she's looking back or forward.

She actually wanted to assume that he was in a dark, confusing place he would some day emerge from, she wanted to put a sticker on it, and just say that he was just avoiding everything with the way he dwelled, and even sometimes laughed at the most terrible things. But the reality of it was that this was the man he was now, he had found his own balance and even wry resignation with things that had happened in the past. Things that were happening now, like this farce of a relationship. Marry him? Gaia, the sense of duty was something to be marvelled at.

She thinks briefly of dilly dally shilly shally. And she feels like a hypocrite, because she has been holding onto a ghost for a long time. Hoping that after the next dinner, maybe after the next time she spreads her legs for it, it might collapse to the mattress and suddenly materialize into the man she knows. Or rather, wants him to be.

"What are you talking about?" She asks, knowing _exactly_ what he's talking about. And it's almost like he smells her act, because his eyes darken and the truth is where is should be. At his lips. And he really is going to say it to her tonight.

"This whole thing. We're not..." He left off, and Tifa finished it off in her own head, words she had said before. _A real family_. He saw the comprehension in her eyes, looked to the children's bedroom doors.

"That doesn't matter, we can work through it, I don't need..." There is desperation there, and an undercurrent of all of the self loathing she sometimes feels when she walks away from his bed in the morning. He smiles, but it is sad and ironic.

"You have always been a bad liar." He says, and her face warms. Lately it's been easy to forget they knew eachother before the world tried to collapse. She sometimes forgets that he knows her, just as well as she knows him. Where truths are considered, they are always standing at opposite sides of the spectrum, no matter what. He can be lost in his own illusions and still maintain that instrinsic honesty, and though she has always been grounded in the hard realities of her lot, she often lies to herself, makes excuses. "Do you remember when I thought I was someone I wasn't?" And there it is, that underlying laughter. Whether it is at himself, or the inevitability of horrific things like that happening to them is another question altogether.

"Yes, I remember." she says, and he looks up at her.

"You looked at me like you'd never seen me before. When I first came." he said. And she knew what he was talking about. "When I came to the bar, you looked at me like I was a stranger." Tifa bit her lip. Among the things she regretted, one of the things at the top of that list was not having the courage to confront Cloud sooner back then and tell him the truth he had somehow lost along the way. She'd been able to tell something was wrong with him, but she hadn't said anything. Even though at times she wanted to shake him and tell him _you're Cloud Strife, where's Cloud Strife? _He had been confused, and more deeply fractured than she ever could have thought. "You knew I was different. And you couldn't hide that you knew."

"I'm sorry that I-" she starts but he looks alarmed and shakes his head.

"No, I'm not asking you to...I'd never blame you for any of that. Tifa, I'm just trying to tell you that even then, you couldn't keep it all to yourself."

"I..."

"So I know you know what I mean. I know that is does matter, and you need more than this. You deserve it."

"I only need you." She says, and it is a potentially sweet thing, but her brokeness echoes louder in it than the words themselves. She is vulnerable, and every cliche of a woman who is absolutely and irrevocably attached to a man.

"What is _wrong_ with you?" He says, mouth set in a hard line. They are both surprised by his words. He is angry. But he's not sure if it's because of her, or because of his own failings. And Tifa's face changes. Her whole mood shifts, and she thinks he has some nerve, she thinks that she has the right to be angry at herself for the unfailing weakness she has for him, but what's he complaining about? It's not like he even feels anything anymore, especially not for her. If she wants to suffer, if she decides she will wait for him, that's what she's going to do. He doesn't seem to understand that can't just up and let go. And no, that bitter irony is not lost on her.

"What's wrong with me? How do you even...You just...what's wrong with you?" she says in weak retort, and he actually laughs.

"Tifa, none of us have the time for that."

"I always will." he ignores her.

"You should find someone who can care for you better, who can give you what you need."

"I-"

"It's _killing_ you Tifa."

"So you're just going to run, again?" he shook his head.

"You know it's not about that. We might as well be honest about it." his words make her scared, because she has been calling the kettle black, and he is absolutely going to call her out. She just always thought he'd come to love her before that happened. But he didn't. He doesn't.

"Cloud..."

"No matter how long I stay here...I'm..." he rubbed his face. "I'm never going to feel what you feel for me." Exhaling, he looks into her eyes again and she feels the full force of his conviction. "Tifa, these days, I don't feel much of anything." It's the blow that hurts more because it has been anticipated for so long.

"I know." she says.

"I'm sorry." He is always sorry.

"I know."

There is a space of silence that is bloated with all the things she wants to say, but that won't make a difference. He is serious about what he has said and deep inside, deeper than even those old blue eyes could penetrate, which was quite a ways, she knew he was right. And she'd known it was coming.

And Cloud comes forward, takes her into his arms. They are strong and tight around her. He's grateful that at least she isn't crying anymore.

"Promise you'll visit...for the kids." she says, a last pathetic resort. He buries his face in her hair.

"I'll visit...for all of you."

A couple days later, he drives off on Fenrir, a box full of all his things, strapped to the back. He has left the ring, shining bright on the bar. She takes it, listening to the silence of the house, and twirls it around in her hands. And taking the pink ribbon still around her arm, she loops it through the ring, and makes a necklace. And for a while she wears it.

Until one day when she goes out back and buries it, deep inside a fertile patch where Marlene is growing flowers, and Denzel is constantly falling on them, practicing hard with his wooden sword.

Author's Note: I was just really in a strange Cloti mood, and it led to this. Especially thinking about different takes on happy endings. I hope you enjoyed it.


End file.
